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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Driving in the snow can be a lot of fun if you know what you're doing. But not everyone is an ace behind the wheel and even if they are, there's always room for improvement. Enter BMW's Winter Driving Experience event that offers special training courses all over Europe, in a variety of road conditions.

For starters there's the BMW Snow Intensive Training course in Sölden (Austria), where you can fine tune your braking and steering technique driving the new BMW X3, 5-Series and the M3, on both uphill and downhill routes.

After mastering the basics, you can switch to the BMW Snow Drift Training, also held in Sölden, where you can drift for a half a day in a 420 hp M3, yodeling all the way.

Finally, you can go to the Artic Circle and take part BMW's Ice Fascination Training, held at the famous Arjeplog (Sweden) test facility. M3s with spikes will be at your disposal as you'll try to hone your skills over specially prepared areas of ice. You will learn when to turn into a corner, how to counter-steer and stabilize a rear-wheel drive car. Or maybe not. Maybe you'll crash all day into the snow banks.

Either way, there's lots of fun to be had for four, five or six days, depending on what course you opt for and previous experience. For more information on bookings and prices, you can visit BMW's dedicated website at www.bmw-drivertraining.com.

Now, all this talk about snow and drifting brings us to the second item on our list: the 25th anniversary of all-wheel-drive, or xDrive, as BMW likes to call it.

It all started in 1985, when the Bavarian engineers fitted the E30 BMW 325iX with permanent all-wheel-drive.

Today, xDrive has an important place in the company's portfolio, as one in four BMWs sold are equipped with the AWD system .

Currently there are 45 models which benefit of the variable distribution of drive between the front and rear wheels, from the compact 3 Series all the way up to the luxurious 7 Series.